When I used to use Microsoft Windows, I used MP3Tag to organise my digital music collection as it allowed for custom scraping scripts to attempt to retrieve tags and covers from specific sources such as my favourite; the Metal Archives script. MP3Tag looks just as bad running via WINE as it does under Microsoft Windows so Puddletag (PyQt), a feature-similar open source alternative, is like a dream come true.

The source, packages and a dependency list are available here but the programme isn’t available in the Ubuntu repository though Andrew of Web Upd8 kindly maintains a PPA:

The error only started happening last year (11.04 and 11.10) when I upgraded from Xubuntu 10.10 and nothing I could think of fixed it so I reverted to the previous release as the computer was only a headless server and occasionally a media centre so the desktop environment was hardly seen. Regardless, I kept an eye on the Launchpad.net Bug and a simple workaround (with possible, minor power-usage regressions) is achieved by adding the following to your GRUB boot configuration:

pci=noacpi

There might be minor power-saving regressions but until the case starts glowing red, I think the Atom-powered board will keep cool.

I spent a while looking into a programme with a GUI that could encode a WebM file in Linux as when I was first researching the royalty-free, open codec when it was just released, there was a distinct lack of tools but I had no idea it’d be this easy with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mkv output.webm

I was shocked as but, really, this is the backbone of video codecs and chances are that any GUI would be just a nastily-skinned obfuscation (and possibly confusion) layer. There are many flags for greater control of the product which can be read about via the –help command or the online documentation but this time the default result is fine for me and I imagine if you’re after those features, you probably know enough to employ them more efficiently from the terminal than an aforementioned brushed-metal GUI. On those themes, why do all almost all WinOS options for these GUIs need to go design their interfaces for non-existent desktop environments? Probably because the hooks to ffmpeg didn’t take long to write.

I finally got around to installing a development build of GIMP from a kind soul’s Launchpad repositorybut ran into a few problems that many people seem to be having:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gimp : Depends: libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.31.2) but 2.30.0-0ubuntu4 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Instructions aren’t as visible on Google as they are for most open source issues (i.e. the first result fixes your problem) so I thought I’d record what was needed (as opposed to what as tried) from start to finish:

I am adding an e-mail attachment feature toan internal “Web App” for a business which will only send images and documents (mostly of a proprietary format) so I came up with a quick and simple PHP function to confirm that the extension’s safe.

Note the inclusion of Microsoft’s file extensions with an “x”-suffix: This mystification was introduced in Office 12 to stimulate upgrades. I don’t agree with their reasoning that has caused extra work for everyone else perhaps because they thought it’d be easier to identify their own files by relying on the extension instead of headers.

I’ve been a bit too busy to keep well-abreast of all of the details but am a huge opponent of un-lawful, “without due course” domain-seizures. As a professional in this field, the intended effects of any legislature would only marginally inconvenience me from doing anything that action legalised by these bills would hope to stop. Not that I would be doing any of those activities: I only use Linux and hence, obviously, the only film I’ve download is Big Buck Bunny and just like most P2P users (evidence in all screenshots) we only share Linux distributions! I just don’t understand why so many people are downloading it then not going on to install it…?

I added a timed “Stop SOPA” button (so come tomorrow they operators of the software aren’t still being harassed) to the menu of an internal “web app” which links to an informative video.

I was having a dreadful time working on an a corporate “web app” with the inline viewing of e-mail attachments. After MIME-decoding, only a third of PDF attachments were displaying! Based on that success ratio, some of you reading this with more experience probably already know what was wrong but it took me quite a while to realise. Continue reading →

If “You have new mail in /var/mail/root” is getting on your nerves and the root user’s mail spool is getting to large to view if and when you need to, you might consider editing crontab to leave you alone:

I thought the days were gone when RAM and storage were interchangeable for consumers since storage space became important to them with the acceptance of high-capacity MP3 players and needing more room for “apps” on their phones. Maybe those days are over and my desktops are eight times inferior to these tablets with 32GiB of RAM.

“I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet.” – Mark Dean, Inventor of the IBM ISA Bus in 1981

I was setting up a Mini-ITX living room LAMP server/media centre consisting of Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 (as the ITX motherboard’s display adaptor doesn’t work properly in later version) and remembered an old Windows Media Centre remote control that hadn’t been used in years. NewEgg are offering professional installation of the remote for $249.99 but I thought I’d save some money by giving it a go first.

It appears to have some level of support by default in Ubuntu 11.10 but to get full support with XBMC, I had to install LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control):